who am i? why am i here?

Somebody save me. I’m on a bus, sitting a few seats away from a chubby, sloppy looking guy with a throaty, gabby voice that carries. Not only that, but he is saying the stupidest things ever. He is going on to the people sitting behind him about how Obama looks unprofessional when he does not wear a suit jacket. “I don’t want to see a leader with his sleeves rolled up and his feet on the table talking about the economic crisis.” I like to think the opinions of people in a democracy matter, that we’re all equal if we vote, that we should be free to express ourselves, etc., etc., but this guy is one for whom muzzles were invented. If people were forced to have a little logic behind their arguments (e.g. if someone is working without a jacket and rolled up shirtsleeves, that might actually mean he is working pretty hard) and some historical perspective (Bush has worked without a jacket as well), maybe I would not have to be subjected, when I’m trying to do work, to a loudmouth whose main concern about our president is whether he wears a tie.

I think I finally understand the way securitizing debt works, thanks to Paddy Hirsch’s of Marketplace’s champagne-at-a-wedding whiteboard illustration (see the video), and it is what I feared and could never really fathom: investors tried to make money off of people’s debt, their massive, unrelenting debt.  Even worse, companies like Citibank could get the debt off of their books by selling it as bonds to investors and then expect to get their failed ventures paid for by the U.S Government.  This is why a bailout is so problematic, as has been said before: these companies took great risks in order to profit off of people’s debt–which credit card companies abetted with draconian interest rates and fees, but now they expect the government to pay for these risks.

Every bailout, Tom Friedman and many news outlets tell us how disastrous it would be to let another bank go into debt, I have to wonder how disastrous it will be when we are faced with the even more immediate bailout of millions of indebted American who will not be able to make any kind of payment–in a car, a house, a credit card, a student loan–and have not yet been given any kind of bailout.  How much inflation will all of these guaranteed debts wreak as the U.S. is forced to print money to fund them? Read the rest of this entry »

In general, I love that the lyrics in R&B soul songs from the golden era–the ’60s through early ’80s–are straightforward, while the accompanying music is often what makes the songs so emotional and personal.  (My friend Joy pointed this out today, and I thought it was very well put and at variance to many songwriters today, who are more esoteric).

Of course, anything can go too far.  Barry White, Isaac Hayes, the Isley Brothers, and so on, have maybe written a few too many songs about making love and being sexy.  Eventually, they employ double meanings to make things interesting.  Sometimes, these double meanings don’t even seem to mean anything.

Case in point.  Joy and I were at Colony Records today and saw this, from Isaac Hayes:

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The “Top Chef” co-host–who is an unmatched TV personality precisely because he does not try to be one–in an interview with Salon:

Why do you think there’s so much interest in chefs at this time?

It started, I would say, in the early to mid-’80s, when people realized they couldn’t just keep going to discos and snorting coke, and they had to grow up and find another form of entertainment. And it became restaurants. I’m serious about that. I’m not joking.

The New York Times has taken advantage of the web by providing a useful Q&A forum for its readers that is directed at public and private officials who are involved in city planning and improvement. It goes some way to increasing transparency of public works and services.

This week’s Q&A should strike a familiar chord for all commuters, as New Yorkers direct their questions toward public interest attorney Gene Russianoff on the subject of improving public transportation. Many of the queries are similar to those that I have had as a commuter in D.C. and Chicago: Why aren’t transit employees at the kiosks informed about delays, and what prevents them from announcing delay times over the speaker system? Why does a sick passenger cause such extensive delays? Why can’t there be special bus lanes in the city? Why isn’t there more of an effort to fix elevators and escalators?

On balance, we should avoid being the impatient and unrealistic commuters who expect everything to run like clockwork all of the time, if only for sanity’s sake. This is actually why transparency on the part of the public transportation system is so important: if commuters know, for instance, why it takes a while for trains to resume when a customer gets sick, are informed of a delay before entering a turnstile, and have the option to re-route our commutes, we will much sooner tolerate inevitable delays, and the transit workers will have less angry crowds to deal with.

D.C.’s Metro deals with some of these problems more smoothly than most.  Still, I can only hope the increase in oil prices puts renewed focus on making even the U.S.’s best public transit systems more service-oriented and in better repair.

I have found a great article by Richard Rothstein that picks apart the popular wisdom that American schools are the prime culprit for the nation losing skilled jobs to other parts of the world, like India and China. This is a good excerpt:

Workforce skills continue to generate rising productivity. In the last five years, wages of both high school- and college-educated workers have been stagnant, while productivity grew by a quite healthy 10.4 percent.

Rising workforce skills can indeed make American firms more competitive. But better skills, while essential, are not the only source of productivity growth. The honesty of our capital markets, the accountability of our corporations, our fiscal policy and currency management, our national investment in R&D and infrastructure, and the fair-play of the trading system (or its absence), also influence whether the U.S. economy reaps the gains of Americans’ diligence and ingenuity. The singular obsession with schools deflects political attention from policy failures in those other realms.

My brother is famous on the blogs again, and I must say, what is most funny about the following is how bizarre it is to read about someone I know so well from the perspective of a recent acquaintance of his.  Young adult novelist and reporter, Lauren Mechling recently featured him on her blog.  The entry was heavily laced in the sort of exuberant girl-who-drinks-a-big-cup-of-tea-in-your-local-coffee-shop-and-likes-to-knit tone that is familiar in general but odd in the particular situation of being homed on someone I know:

This post is going to take a little explaining. My favorite person on earth is Arthur Meyer, who works at my local bookstore and is this pink-cheeked secret treasure of a person. I don’t know exactly what it is about him, but whenever I see him Im in stitches–once he was recommending books on the basis of how fun they are to shelve, once he was persuading me that the best book in all of the store was “Theres a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom” and another time he was recounting the indignity of dressing up as Magic Johnson for Halloween and being mistaken for a black cancer patient. Anyway, how can you not love a kid like Arthur? Also–hello! he’s called Arthur Meyer.

A different writer might render my brother in a very different lens.  I think it is cool that Mechling has clearly developed a writer’s voice and trains it well on people she encounters in life.

Interesting challenge to the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) anti-piracy suits are being challenged in court:

As it has done with lawsuits against college students around the country, the RIAA offered to settle the case if Ms. Andersen paid a few thousand dollars. But Ms. Andersen decided to fight back in federal court and even countersued, arguing that the way the organization hunts for music pirates is illegal. The RIAA employs a company called Media Sentry to search out copyright infringers.

I could relate to one of Cary Tennis’ columns from last week pretty well. “Shouldn’t Have Left” wrote that ever since she had arrived to Europe for a study abroad program, she had been feeling a malaise uncharacteristic of her and her earlier-held excitement about the prospects of living in Europe. Cary advises her to plan her days out while accepting that going abroad is never what one expects from it:

Make a schedule for each day. Pick an activity for each day and make yourself do it. Plan your transportation. Plan your currency. Make yourself do it.

I have to say, if I had received salutary advice like this while I was abroad, I would have still felt a bit defeated, because it is simply more difficult in a new setting to do those things we can do in our own society, especially making friends. However, he is right that she ought to be pro-active, if only to make the most of her time abroad.

When I was abroad, I had similar feelings at times. I found myself longing for comforts of home that I had not even particularly sought out at home, like McDonalds and Starbucks. I would go as far as to steal away to the Starbucks in the Opéra section of Paris, with an underlying worry that I would be caught.

Looking back on this, I have to think that there is no reason for a foreigner to be shy about seeking some of what she knew in her native country. Someone should tell every person who is going abroad that it is perfectly reasonable to question why you decided to leave friends, family, and home. Anyone who wonders what is wrong with them because everyone else they knew thought study abroad was “amazing” should know that most people have low points while abroad.

I am guessing that this letter writer’s defeated spirits stem in part from the feeling that she should be having a great time, because she is abroad, where she is supposed to be changed. There is a tendency to exoticize “abroad,” as if every other nation that’s not us is an enlightened, cultured, non-white bread, destination. The beauty of studying abroad is that it challenges this. You see that people in your host country deal with the mundanities and challenges of daily life just as you do.